PLACES

In 2002 Esther Shalev-Gerz produced an installation from the multiple perceptions of lived experiences by residents of Cahors, France but also from images of material held in the municipal collection, also seen to be representative of the place and a custodian of its history.

In the installation Shalev-Gerz exhibited a video with fifty-five people of diverse ages offering their spoken responses to her question, “Why do you live in Cahors today?” Shalev-Gerz altered the video’s colour register so participants were depicted at the halfway mark between black and white and colour ensuring a subtle emphasis on the voice. Alongside the video were fifty-five photographs of artefacts chosen by Shalev-Gerz from the municipal museum’s accumulated and eclectic collection, which includes both the banal and extraordinary and the local and the foreign. The moving images – animated with people talking about displacement and settlement, about the passing of time and passage of people and of endurance and transformation were contrasted by the inanimate photographic images of artefacts.